In the rapidly advancing communications field people benefit from communicating information swiftly and efficiently. Beyond the transmission of vocal and textual information, media content is often intertwined in the information stream. The procedures of retrieving and coupling media content with textual or vocal information streams are cumbersome and time consuming. This leads to deficient use of media content which would otherwise greatly enhance the information stream.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,424 discloses a hypertext browser that displays hypertext pages and indicates draggable elements on the page being viewed. The browser also displays drop targets and detects when a user selects a draggable element and drops the draggable element within a drop target. The browser display includes a toolbar containing one or more drop target atoms which are represented by object icons and which may change depending on what server the browser is currently connected to.
US2004268259 (Microsoft Corp.) discloses methods and systems for presenting commands to a user within a software application program by determining the user's context within the application program and automatically presenting in a user interface commands that pertain to the user's current context.
Text and character editing systems are also known that provide an autocorrect facility, whereby a string entered by the user is automatically changed on the fly to a different string or to a graphical symbol. This technique is used in word-processing software to correct typos and to provide a user-friendly interface for entering symbols such as © by typing a predetermined sequence of characters, such as (c). A similar technique is used to insert glyphs such as  by typing :). Mobile telephones and other hand-held devices offering a similar facility are also known.
The autocorrect feature as described above maps each source character sequence to a unique target string or symbol. Of course, the same target string or symbol can be mapped to more than one source string: so, for example, both ‘accommodate’ ‘acommodate’ may be automatically corrected to ‘accommodate’. When there is a clear and unique mapping between source and target strings, as in this example, the forced conversion from an incorrect string to a correct string is efficient. However, it is by no means always desirable to force such conversion. For example, the third paragraph of a sequence may be manually identified as (c) and it is frustrating if this is automatically changed to the copyright symbol. For this reason, an ‘undo’ facility is often provided that allows an autocorrected target string or symbol to be changed back to the source sequence.
Likewise, a source string may be ambiguous. For example, a typist who typed ‘accommodatin’ may have intended ‘accommodating’ or ‘accommodation’. Spell check features frequently provides a list of feasible alternatives for manual selection by the typist; but autocorrect features cannot offer such facility because it would render them manual and thereby militate against the automatic nature of the correction.
Since the target string or symbol replaces the source sequence, the autocorrect feature does not preserve both source and target sequences in the final document or message. Therefore, the autocorrect feature does not provide a mechanism for enhancing documents by embedding multimedia content such as glyphs alongside a character sequence with which the respective glyph is associated. But in the interest of making a multimedia message more interesting and ‘spicy’ it may be desired to embed glyphs or other multimedia elements in the message in a manner that permits a logical or cognitive relationship with the multimedia element and a character sequence with which it is associated and yet that preserves both the source character sequence and also the target multimedia element, preferably in spatial coordination so that the multimedia elements on their own provide a fair indication of the message content.
Moreover, as noted, there is no provision in the autocorrect feature to map a single source character sequence to multiple target strings or symbols. Consequently, the autocorrect feature does not even partially address the need to allow alternative multimedia elements to be associated with a given source sequence.